Opinion
Column

LEVANT: CBC attack on our Forces offensive

Last week the CBC got its hands on an amateur video produced by some of our soldiers for a comedy night at a military base in Nova Scotia back in 2010.

It was a short, four-minute spoof making fun of Osama Bin Laden's older brother, "Eugene."

The CBC says it got this video last month. But it sat on it for weeks, in order to release it as a big, breathless exclusive right before Remembrance Day.

It's obvious why. It was the CBC's way of showing what it thinks of our Canadian Forces: That they're a bunch of racist pigs.

The CBC said the video was an exclusive. But it actually wasn't. Because the CBC called the military police to come watch the video at the CBC offices. The CBC isn't just reporting on this "scandal." It is pitching it to the police, with the implication that the police should lay charges.

The CBC isn't even pretending to be reporters. It is an anti-military activist.

The problem is that the video that it breathlessly "revealed" wasn't controversial at all.

It was a soldier pretending to be bin Laden's brother, hiding out in Vancouver.

Maybe the jokes weren't particularly funny. But that's not what the CBC was outraged by. It thinks it's horrendous that our soldiers, who put themselves in harm's way fighting against Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan, might actually make fun of bin Laden and some of the things al-Qaida and the Taliban do, like use car bombs.

The most common word in the CBC's report was "offensive." But that's not reporting. Reporting is telling the facts. Saying, again and again, that a video was offensive, is offering its opinion.

What exactly was the problem?

That a soldier wore a beard and painted his face brown to pretend to be Osama bin Laden? Isn't that what you do when you're pretending to be bin Laden?

I bet our soldiers put on a fake moustache and spoke in a German accent when they were doing anti-Hitler skits in the 1940s, too.

But doesn't the CBC sometimes do skits, similar to this, making fun of people? Even Osama bin Laden?

Why, yes, it does. With fake beards and accents, too.

It's rare for the CBC to mock a Muslim -- too politically incorrect.

Much more common are their unfunny attacks on Catholicism, turned into skits by adding a laugh track. But once in a while it does do a token satire of terrorists.

So how did the CBC square the fact that it has comedians speaking in accents and beards mocking bin Laden, with its scandalous "exclusive" that our Canadian Forces did it, but they were "offensive"?

The CBC has more than a dozen comedians and comedy writers on staff, but it asked its one visible minority, Shaun Majumder -- the same guy who usually plays bin Laden on the CBC -- to explain why he can do it but soldiers can't.

Majumder was pitiful. He said he can do it because he's a professional and the soldiers weren't. He said he's culturally sensitive and the soldiers weren't.

And he said that in the anti-Muslim "backlash" in the west, it's never OK to mock Islam. Except when he does it.

Majumder should stick to comedy -- not being a snitch on The National, ratting out other comedians as hate criminals.

And the CBC should stop its smear campaign against our Canadian Forces.

Offensive?

What's offensive is the government broadcaster demonizing our brave soldiers.